This morning I'll post yet another example of a healthcare financing debacle.

There are undoubtedly thousands upon thousands of these, the vast majority of which don't reach the public eye and are suffered quietly by the powerless victims. This story about a myocardial infarction successfully treated with stents was posted by Kaiser Health News:

Patient: Drew Calver, 44, a high school history teacher and father of two in Austin, Texas.

... [as he was recovering from his MI and the stent placements], Calver asked whether
his health insurance would cover all of this, a financial worry that
accompanies nearly every American hospital stay. He was concerned
because St. David’s is out-of-network on his school district health
plan. The hospital told him not to worry and that they would accept his
insurance, Calver said...

And then the bills came.

Total Bill: $164,941 for a four-day hospital stay,
including $42,944 for four stents and $10,920 for room charges. Calver’s
insurer paid $55,840. The hospital billed Calver for the unpaid balance
of $108,951.31.

Medical Treatment: Emergency room treatment followed by
four days in the hospital, most of it spent in the cardiac unit. During
surgery, four stents were implanted to clear a blockage in his left
anterior descending artery, the source of so-called widow-maker heart
attacks, because they are so frequently deadly...

Surprise bills occur when a patient goes to a hospital in his insurance
network but receives treatment from a doctor that does not participate
in the network, resulting in a direct bill to the patient. They can also
occur in cases like Calver’s, where insurers will pay for needed
emergency care at the closest hospital — even if it is out-of-network —
but the hospital and the insurer may not agree on a reasonable price.
The hospital then demands that patients pay the difference, in a
practice called balance billing...

This case “illustrates the dangers that even insured people face,” said
Carol Lucas, an attorney in Los Angeles with experience in health care
payment disputes. “The unfairness is especially acute when there is an
emergency and the patient, who might ordinarily be completely compliant,
has no say about the facility he winds up in.”..

St. David’s charged $19,708 apiece for two Synergy stents made by
device giant Boston Scientific. Two other stents used were far cheaper.

The $20,000 price tag represents a significant markup of what U.S.
hospitals typically pay themselves for stents. The median price paid by
hospitals for the Synergy stent was $1,153 over the past year, according
to the nonprofit research firm ECRI Institute.

Every now and then I allow myself to rant about matters that drive me to distraction, including health care financing in this county. I spent over 30 years in academic medicine, and I have immense admiration for the people who actually provide the hands-on healthcare in this country, especially the nurses and therapists. The problems arise from the vast army of administrators, coinsurers, financial analysts, billing clerks, chart analysts, insurance adjusters, collection agencies and others who feed off an ever-expanding and ever-more-complex web of regulations and policies.

There is no need for cases like the one detailed above to occur. The system doesn't need to be this complex. Even the people who administer the system realize it is fucked-up, but they don't have the power to make changes in a bureaucracy that is extraordinarily complex.

Look what happened in this case after the story was publicized:

UPDATE: Monday, shortly after publication and broadcast of this
story by Kaiser Health News and NPR, St. David’s said it was now willing
to accept $782.29 to resolve the $108,951 balance because Drew Calver
qualifies for its “financial assistance discount.”

Got that? They graciously offer a "discount" from $109,000 to $800. Because someone took the time to bring this story out of the darkness and expose it to daylight.

I don't care whom you vote for this November - Republican, Democrat, Independent - but please for the love of God and in the name of common sense, vote for someone who will totally gut this system of health care finance.

And don't accept the lame alternative of a politician who assures you that under his/her proposal "everyone will have health insurance." This case - and tens of thousands of untold ones - illustrates why that is an inadequate alternative.

A baluster—also called spindle or stair stick—is a moulded shaft, square or of lathe-turned form, cut from a rectangular or square plank, one of various forms of spindle in woodwork, made of stone or wood, and sometimes of metal or plastic. standing on a unifying footing, and supporting the coping of a parapet or the handrail of a staircase.

Multiplied in this way, they form a balustrade. Individually, a baluster shaft
may describe the turned form taken by a brass or silver candlestick, an
upright furniture support, or the stem of a brass chandelier, etc.

The word banister (also bannister) refers to the balusters of a stairway. It has been defined as either a handrail, especially on a staircase, or such a handrail together with its supporting structures.

Etymology: Frenchbalustre, from Italianbalaustro(“pillar”), from balausta(“wild pomegranate flower”), so named because of resemblance to the swelling form of the half-open flower.

This much is certain: Helen Gambichler is running for office. She is the Queens Democratic Party bosses’ nominee for a spot on a little-known body called the Democratic County Committee.

There
is just one problem: Ms. Gambichler, a 72-year-old retired court clerk,
did not know she was running for anything. Nor does she wish to run. “I
have no idea what that’s about,” she said.

She had been nominated, without her knowledge, by the borough’s Democratic Party leadership, which is struggling to maintain control after the longtime Queens party chairman, Representative Joseph Crowley, was trounced by the left-leaning insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a June Congressional primary that sent tremors through the Democratic establishment nationwide.

Ms. Gambichler is hardly alone.

The
New York Times called dozens of the Queens party machine’s nominees for
county committee. The candidates for 21 seats were running without
their consent.

Most of these candidates did not know they were running at all until a
reporter told them; two, including Ms. Gambichler, found out when they
got letters from the city Board of Elections showing how their names
would appear on the Sept. 13 primary ballot. Only four candidates The
Times spoke to said they were running on purpose.

28 August 2018

I thought about each panel in sequence, then laughed when I finally got to the final one, because I totally enjoyed the Westworld TV series, but before it was over I too was resorting to some recreational beverages.

Lenka Clayton is a conceptual artist and recent mother. She wanted to continue her artistic endeavors while staying at home with her one-year-old son. The photo above is a portion of the mounted collection of objects she removed from her son's mouth between ages 8-15 months.

You didn't think so? Neither did I. I thought the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. But I hadn't paid attention to the conditional clause:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.

Here's some discussion of the penal exemption:

The Thirteenth Amendment exempts penal labor from its prohibition of
forced labor. This allows prisoners who have been convicted of crimes
(not those merely awaiting trial) to be required to perform labor or
else face punishment while in custody.

It was apparently considered noncontroversial at the time, or at least legislators gave it little thought... slave labor as a just punishment for robbery, so that the thief's labor could be used to pay recompense to their victims and to society...

Various commentators have accused states of abusing this provision to
re-establish systems similar to slavery, or of otherwise exploiting such
labor in a manner unfair to local labor...prison labor continues in America under a variety of justifications.
Prison labor programs vary widely; some are uncompensated prison
maintenance tasks, some are for local government maintenance tasks, some
are for local businesses, and others are closer to internships. Modern
rationales for prison labor programs often include reduction of
recidivism and re-acclimation to society.

In addition to loss of life, the strikers, led by a network of incarcerated activists who call themselves Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, have put out a set of 10 demands
to overhaul America’s creaking penal system. High up on the list is an
end to forced or underpaid labor that the protesters call a form of
modern slavery.

More than 800,000 prisoners are put to work each day cleaning, cooking,
farming and mowing, in some states compulsorily. In states like
Louisiana compensation is as low as 4¢ an hour, even though prisons are
entirely reliant on such labor.

[Kate McClure] was a motorist on Interstate 95 in Philadelphia who found herself stuck on an off-ramp, scared and out of gas.

[Johnny Bobbitt] was a homeless veteran who told her to lock her doors, then spent his last $20 to bring her a canister of fuel.

Later
she sought to repay the favor, first with cereal bars and warm socks
and spare dollars, then with a GoFundMe campaign to raise money so the
good Samaritan would not have to sleep under a bridge...

They hoped the GoFundMe would raise $10,000... In a few months, the campaign had raised more than $400,000 from nearly 14,000 donors...

Instead of a house, McClure and [her partner] D’Amico got Bobbitt
a camper, which they kept in their names and parked on land owned by
D’Amico’s family, according to news reports. They bought him a
television, a laptop and two cellphones, food and clothing — and a used
SUV that was soon broken-down and idle. What he didn’t get, though, was any type of ownership over the money raised on his behalf...

McClure is a receptionist for the New Jersey Department of Transportation and D’Amico is a carpenter, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. But suddenly she had a new BMW, and the couple was taking vacations to Florida and California and Las Vegas...

The money that came to Bobbitt couldn’t stop his addiction. He went
through two unsuccessful stints in rehab that brought him no closer to
being sober...

If Bobbitt’s claims are true, it would be the biggest case of GoFundMe fraud or mismanagement seen by GoFraudMe, a whistleblower organization, according to Adrienne Gonzalez, the site’s publisher.

Some
of the hucksters are serial scammers who start dozens or hundreds of
bogus campaigns in a day, said Gonzalez. Others fake diseases, figuring
no one will demand evidence of, say, a recent cancer diagnosis.

The graph above, found at the Charles Schwab website, shows how dramatically inflation has been curbed over the past twenty years - not just in the U.S., but globally.

I was a young adult in the 1970s, and I can clearly remember getting a paycheck and going the next day to a local bank to purchase a bank certificate of deposit yielding about 12%. I think anyone who has managed their own money just for the past 20 years has very little concept of the influence of inflation.

Conversely, my experience through the 1970s-1990s "taught me" (incorrectly) that I could safely rely on 4-5% interest yields during my retirement. No way, Jose. I had no concept that fixed income returns would ever be less than 1% - and for sustained periods of time.

There is an old saying that "the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent." There's a certain truth to that.

But if I were going to bet now and plan for a future 20-30 years from now, I wouldn't count on inflation and interest rates staying at these historic lows.

Exactly what the title says. No suction required to start the siphoning process.

Addendum: I just read something tonight that said Thomas Jefferson cited the siphon effect as an explanation for intermittent water flows at natural springs. I'll have to research that later, but this would be a starting place.

The 39th president of the United States lives modestly, a sharp contrast
to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of
another kind: wealth. Even those who didn’t start out rich, including Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama, have made tens of millions of dollars on the private-sector
opportunities that flow so easily to ex-presidents...

The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or
give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to
“capitalize financially on being in the White House.”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said that Gerald Ford,
Carter’s predecessor and close friend, was the first to fully take
advantage of those high-paid post-presidential opportunities, but that
“Carter did the opposite.”

Since Ford, other former presidents, and sometimes their spouses, routinely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech.

“I
don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing
it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be
rich.”..

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has
written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East
peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s
book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby
Snoogle-Fleejer.”

With book income and the $210,700 annual
pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But
his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent
presidents...

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy
friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent
flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle
greeting other passengers and taking selfies...

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t
work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed
some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto
Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played...

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of
“keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords
that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize
relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for
his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter has been notably quiet about President Trump. But on this night, two years into Trump’s term, he’s not holding back.

“I think he’s a disaster,” Carter says. “In human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal.”..

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just
finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef
and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own
yogurt.

On this summer morning, Rosalynn mixes pancake batter and sprinkles in blueberries grown on their land. Carter cooks them on the griddle.

Then he does the dishes.

I highly recommend reading the full story at the Washington Post. His life and his personal principles offer such a stark contrast to current and recent presidents. Here's one final excerpt about his home:

...a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

I think everyone is familiar with the process documented here, but the title "nutation - vine - speeded up" triggered a lookup. A search showed I have used the word only once (in a different context) in the life of this blog, in a quote from John Quincy Adams:

“… if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first
observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether
and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel
shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke
herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the
inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations
of government.

I had to look up the meaning then, and because ten years have passed, I had to look it up again.

Nutation is the bending movements executed by some plant organs, such as stems, leaves, roots, etc., by which the part is inclined successively in various directions.
Nutations are due to the unequal rate of growth of different sides of
the organ, an inequality which, so far as is known at present (c. 1915),
is dependent upon internal (unknown) causes and is not called forth by
the action of external stimuli. The word is often used in a broad sense
in the phrase nutational movement, to include all the movements in plants caused by growth in contrast to variation movements or movements produced by reversible turgor changes.

It has a slightly different meaning in physics. Etymology from the Lain for "nodding."

24 August 2018

Top image hat tip to Alex Santoso, who found this excellent optical illusion on Twitter and posted it at Neatorama in 2012. Reposted to add the bottom one, via. The two illusions are based on the same principles; I believe the lower one was just modified to bring the inner circle closer to the outer one.

Like other oceanfront projects, this one would
protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also
has another priority — to shield some of the crown jewels of the
petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming
and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the
consequences of it.

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline
that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of
Houston that are home to one of the world's largest concentrations of
petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas' 30 refineries, which
represent 30 percent of the nation's refining capacity.

Texas
is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly
all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government
fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm
barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities...

Normally outspoken critics of federal spending, Texas Sens. John Cornyn
and Ted Cruz both backed using taxpayer funds to fortify the oil
facilities' protections and the Texas coast. Cruz called it "a
tremendous step forward."..

The proposals approved for funding originally called for building more
protections along larger swaths of the Texas coast, but they were scaled
back and now deliberately focus on refineries...

Oil and chemical companies also pushed for more protection for surrounding communities to shield their workforces...

Texas has not tapped its own rainy day fund of around $11 billion.
According to federal rules, 35 percent of funds spent by the Army Corps
of Engineers must be matched by local jurisdictions, and the
GOP-controlled state Legislature could help cover such costs. But such
spending may be tough for many conservatives to swallow.

Texas
"should be funding things like this itself," said Chris Edwards, an
economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Texans are proud of their
conservatism, but, unfortunately, when decisions get made in Washington,
that frugality goes out the door."

For most of us, anthrax evokes fearful memories of white powder in envelopes. The disease, however, is an ancient one. God’s fifth plague upon the Egyptians — ‘‘Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain,” Moses told Pharaoh — may well have been an anthrax outbreak. The same goes for Apollo’s bane upon the Greeks at the beginning of the Iliad. (Homer dubbed the disease “the burning wind of plague.”) Perhaps the most striking description from antiquity of what we now know as Bacillus anthracis comes from Virgil’s Georgics:

Nor was the manner of dying a simple matter: After the thirsty slake-seeking fever had gone All through the veins and withered the pitiful limbs, Then a fluid welled up in the suffering body, and Piece by piece absorbed the melting bones.

B. anthracis is a cruel organism. In their passive form, the bacteria live as hard, oval-shaped spores with thick, nearly indestructible walls that allow them to survive for decades. When the spores colonize a victim’s bloodstream, they enter a vegetative state, dissolving their walls and gathering into neat chains that Robert Koch, the nineteenth-century German scientist whose pioneering work helped identify the disease, described as “graceful, artificially ordered strings of pearls.” In order to survive, the bacteria must kill the host and reproduce inside it before escaping back into the world and returning to a resting state.

Anthrax bacteria produce two lethal toxins in tandem, akin to those that cause tetanus and cholera. The process tends to be swift, and the chances of fatality high. The early symptoms resemble those of the common flu: your head begins to ache; your temperature rises; a general sense of weakness envelops your body; your stomach starts rumbling; you begin to cough incessantly. Then things get serious: you may go into seizures; your organs begin failing; boils break out across your skin, swelling red pustules with a trademark black center. In the fifth century bc, Hippocrates dubbed the disease anthrakes, from the ancient Greek for “charcoal.”

The disease has triumphed once the blood begins spilling from your orifices. When the medical examiners or the veterinarians cut you open, they will find that your blood has gone black, and that certain organs, particularly the spleen, have turned into masses of melting flesh.

Now the melting of the Siberian permafrost is unleashing anthrax bacilli that have been frozen there for centuries. Vast herds of reindeer are being decimated and a way of life destroyed for native subarctic peoples. Details in a longread at Harper's Magazine.

21 August 2018

I first reported on the remarkable barn of the Sonnenberg family back in 2013, updating with the above photo in 2015. This year it was time to repaint the barn, so I returned to meet old friends and document the process.

The first step had already been undertaken by the family, who had contracted with a local Amish family to repaint the barn. That required removal of the butterflies and the use of some heavy equipment to get them down and put them back up.

While one crew worked at the barn, others gathered in the front yard to get the butterfly appliques ready.

The butterflies had been repainted during this past winter. Here are the larger ones (Red Admiral, Mourning Cloak, Painted Lady, Buckeye, swallowtails, fritillaries, etc. All of the wooden appliques had been hand-drawn and cut at a scale of one foot to one inch of real life size. The hand-repainting was done by family members, neighbors, and friends from the local church, who gathered this past weekend for the festivity of remounting them on the newly-painted barn.

In the shade of the front yard trees, screws were preset into the wings to speed up the work of the crew at the barn.

I was particularly impressed that some took the time to touch up the screw heads to match the underlying wing color - a detail that would be invisible to people driving by on the road.

The small butterflies (skippers, blues, coppers, hairstreaks) are depicted from the side, with the wings folded up over the torso, in part because they typically rest in that position, and because the undersides of the wings often have the definitive markings.

While that was going on in the front yard, another crew in the garage was repainting the barn quilt. The Sonnenberg farm is registered as part of the Marquette County Barn Quilt Trail. This particular barn quilt depicts a stylized butterfly (only half of the quilt in this photo; see top photo for the entire).

As the afternoon went by, the butterflies landed on the wall. What passers-by on the road don't realize is that the ones on the barn wall are not just Wisconsin butterflies, but 50 different species that have been documented on this particular farm.

That impressive diversity is attributed in part to the owners' decisions to maintain large patches of the farm in native plants and undisturbed habitat.

As the work neared completion, participants gathered in the house and the front yard for an old-fashioned bring-a-dish-to-pass picnic. Those magnificent trees reflect the age of the farm, which has been in the same family for over a hundred years. This is the fourth generation to actively farm this land.

The state of Wisconsin recognizes "century farms" that not only have been active for a hundred years, but have been maintained by descendants of a single family during that time. Wisconsin became a state in 1848, so the program was started in 1948 and currently includes about 9,000 farms located at some of the best sites that pioneering families could find in the early statehood years.

There are lots of ways to spend a summer afternoon, and lots of places to picnic, but not many better than the front yard of a historic farm; it refreshed some now-vague memories of my childhood years visiting grandparents on their old farm in southern Minnesota. This gathering of friends and family for a communal project reminded me in many ways of a classic "barn-raising." It was a delightful experience.

20 August 2018

The Saddle Ridge Hoard is the name given to identify a treasure trove of 1,427 gold coins unearthed in the Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada, California in 2013. The face value of the coins totaled $27,980, but was assessed to be worth $10 million. In total, the hoard
contains $27,460 in twenty-dollar coins, $500 in ten-dollar coins, and
$20 in five-dollar coins, all dating from 1847 to 1894. The collection
is the largest known discovery of buried gold coins that has ever been
recovered in the US.

The owners of the property discovered the trove while they were walking
their dog on their property. Although they had reportedly hiked the
trail numerous times previously, it was not until they spotted a rust-covered metal can poking out of the ground that they chose to explore further... After Mary noticed the can, John bent down to pick it up, but found that
it was stuck in the dirt. He began to use a piece of wood to pry it
from the ground. It was so heavy that they believed that the can likely
held lead paint.
On their walk back to their house, struggling to carry the weight of
the find, the lid of the can cracked open, revealing the edge of a
single gold coin.
They returned to the site with some hand tools to see if they could
find anything else. They found another can about a foot away from where
the first can was discovered. Although it was partially decomposed due
to rust, it held several more coins. They continued to return to the
site to look for more coins, primarily digging in the ground and
eventually using a metal detector. Their work eventually resulted in the discovery of eight cans filled with 1,427 coins.

I am recurrently frustrated that nobody seems to have buried cans of gold in my woods or along the trails where I hike.

The origin of such tunneling has previously been attributed to abiotic
processes. Here we present physical and chemical remains of endolithic
microorganisms within the tunnels and discuss a probable biological
origin of the tunnels. Extensive investigations with
synchrotron-radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM) reveal
morphological indications of biogenicity that further support a
euendolithic interpretation. We suggest that the production of the
tunnels was initiated by a combination of abiotic and biological
processes, and that at later stages biological processes came to
dominate. In environments such as river sediments and oxidized soils
garnets are among the few remaining sources of bio-available Fe2+,
thus it is likely that microbially mediated boring of the garnets has
trophic reasons. Whatever the reason for garnet boring, the tunnel
system represents a new endolithic habitat in a hard silicate mineral
otherwise known to be resistant to abrasion and chemical attack.

That was from the Abstract; here are a couple excerpts from elsewhere in the manuscript -

Endoliths are microorganisms living inside substrates, mostly rocks and minerals, but also shells, corals or wood [1,2].
Endolithic lineages have been developed among bacteria, fungi, algae,
and several animal phyla, and they can either be chemolithoautotrophs
(which utilize inorganically stored energy and carbon from inorganic
sources like minerals), heterotrophs, or even photoautotrophs (like
cyanobacteria) [2,3].
The usual advantage of entertaining an endolithic lifestyle is to
obtain residence space—a hard or soft substrate provides a stable and
protected environment compared to the outside. However, heterotrophs and
chemolithoautotrophs may bore a substrate for trophic reasons as well.
Saprophytic fungi, for instance, frequently bore into wood and bone [3], and mycorrhizal fungi are known to bore into soil minerals to mobilize nutrients for symbiotic plants [4,5].
Prokaryotic microborers are believed to bore in volcanic glass to
oxidize reduced iron and manganese species for their metabolism [6,7]...

A plethora of microorganisms including bacteria, fungi and algae are
known to chemically etch minerals by excreting organic acids or
chelators, such as siderophores, that act corrosively to certain
minerals or elements..

The organic content of the garnet interior detected by ToF-SIMS and the
complex nature of these organic molecules indicate microbial presence
within the tunnel system of the garnets... Complex tunnel structures, as in the current study, are not likely to be
formed exclusively by chemical dissolution but need the involvement of
an agent that controls the direction [6].

The complexity of the networks with anastomoses between branches further
rules out AITs. Anastomosis is in fact exclusively a biological feature
but anastomosing tunnels produced by endolithic microorganisms have not
yet been reported. Thus, even though the tunnels, at least partly,
might look non-biogenic at first glance there is no conceivable
non-biological mechanism that can explain the formation of them...

The transition from polygonal entrance pits at the mineral surfaces to
more circular and tapering tunnels further into the minerals suggests
that the tunnels were initiated by abiotic processes or a combination of
abiotic and biological processes, which further into the mineral shift
to predominantly biological processes.

The chief executives of America’s top 350 companies earned 312 times
more than their workers on average last year, according to a new report
published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute.

The rise came after the bosses of America’s largest companies got an
average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in
compensation while their employees’ wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over
the year...

“As a mathematical matter, had there not been the redistribution
upward – to the top 5%, but which is mostly about to the top 1% – the
wages of the bottom 90% could have grown twice as fast as it actually
did.”

Wikipedia has an extensive list, from which I've extracted some of the names I recognize:

Alan Alda born 1936 An actor most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. Alda contracted polio at age seven, during an epidemic. His parents administered a painful treatment, developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny, in which hot woolen blankets were applied to the limbs and the muscles were stretched by massage

Mia Farrow born 1945 An actress who was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 2000, and campaigns in the fight against polio. Farrow collapsed on her ninth birthday and was diagnosed with polio two days later. She was in the hospital for eight months, where an iron lung maintained her breathing.

Gwen Verdon 1925–2000 An actress and dancer on Broadway and in films. Verdon was encouraged to dance by her mother, a dance teacher, as therapy for her polio-afflicted legs.

Johnny Weissmuller 1904–1984 At age nine, Weissmüller contracted polio. At the suggestion of his doctor, he took up swimming to help battle the disease, and he went on to win five Olympic gold medals in the sport during the 1920s.

Arthur C. Clarke 1917–2008 A science-fiction author and inventor. He contracted polio in February 1962, which confined him to bed for months. In 1984, he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, and he spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair.

Judy Collins born 1939 As a child, singer-songwriter Judy Collins spent several months in the hospital recovering from bout with polio. Collins later became a representative for UNICEF and has worked to promote polio vaccination programmes.

Donovan born 1946 Folk singer-songwriter and guitarist Donovan contracted polio... This left him with a limp and feeling excluded. However, he says "I kind of look back on it and think it was positive for me because it made me withdraw from my pals and realise I was different."

Michael Flanders 1922–1975 An actor, broadcaster, and writer and performer of comic songs, often in partnership with Donald Swann. He contracted polio in 1943 while serving in the Royal Navy, and required a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Joni Mitchell born 1943 A musician, songwriter and painter. Mitchell started singing at age nine while in the hospital recovering from polio. Her distinctive sound featured dozens of non-standard guitar tunings, which she developed partly to compensate for a weakened arm.

Itzhak Perlman born 1945 A virtuoso violinist. He contracted polio at the age of four. Perlman requires braces and crutches to walk, and plays the violin seated.

Dinah Shore 1916–1994 A big band singer, actress and talk show host. Shore contracted polio, aged 18 months, which left her right leg crippled. She recovered strength through massage, swimming and tennis.

Neil Young born 1945 A singer-songwriter and guitarist. He caught polio at age five, during the epidemic of 1951.

Mitch McConnell born 1942 A Republican member of the United States Senate from Kentucky and current Senate Minority Leader. He contracted polio at age two resulting in a paralyzed left leg, but eventually recovered with physical therapy.

Robert McNamara 1916–2009 A business executive and former United States Secretary of Defense. Both McNamara and his wife contracted polio in August 1945. He was in the hospital for a couple of months but his wife was badly affected and remained there for nine months. His career change from Harvard professor to the Ford Motor Company was made to pay her hospital bills.

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945 U.S. President 1933-1945. FDR founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now called the March of Dimes. He spent as much time as he could recuperating from Poliomyelitis in the waters of Warm Springs, Georgia where he founded one of the first rehabilitation facilities for Polio survivors.

Bud Grant born 1927 The long-time former American football head coach of the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League for eighteen seasons. He caught polio as a child, leaving one leg shortened. He was advised to take up sport as therapy.

Jack Nicklaus born 1940 A professional golfer who has won many major golf championships. He caught polio, aged 13. Nicklaus was affected with stiffness, pain and weight loss over two weeks. He recovered without any paralysis but believes he may have post-polio syndrome, which makes his joints sore.

Wilma Rudolph 1940–1994 A track and field athlete, Rudolph was the first American woman to win three gold medals at the Olympic Games. At age four, she contracted polio and lost the use of her left leg. After five years of massage and exercises, she managed to walk again without her leg braces. By the time she was a teenager, Rudolph was faster than the boys in her neighbourhood were. Rudolph won a bronze medal, aged 16, at the 1956 Summer Olympics and three gold medals in the 1960 Summer Olympics.

Frida Kahlo 1907–1954 A painter who was the subject of a 2002 movie starring Salma Hayek. She caught polio, aged six, and spent several months in bed. Kahlo was left with a deformed and shortened right leg.

Dorothea Lange 1895–1965 A photographer and photojournalist most noted for her picture Migrant Mother. She caught polio, aged seven, and was left with a withered right lower leg and a limp. Lang said, "It was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I've never gotten over it and am aware of the force and power of it."

Henriette Wyeth 1907–1997 A portrait artist. She caught polio as a child, which crippled her right hand. She compensated by holding the paint brush between her first and second fingers.

The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth's 0.02% (by weight) water content...

Li Zeng continued, "Our data indicate that about 35% of all known exoplanets which are bigger than Earth should be water-rich. These water worlds likely formed in similar ways to the giant planet cores (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) which we find in our own solar system. The newly-launched TESS mission will find many more of them, with the help of ground-based spectroscopic follow-up. The next generation space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, will hopefully characterize the atmosphere of some of them. This is an exciting time for those interested in these remote worlds".

I remember growing up with the concept that the presence of water was what made Earth unique in the cosmos.

The website FiveThirtyEight has issued their first comprehensive analysis of the mid-term elections coming this fall. From the poll data available at this time, they estimate a 75% chance that the House of Representatives will flip to control by the Democrats.

The data are revised on a daily basis as new information comes in, so those interested in the elections might want to bookmark the site for future reference.

Update Sept 4:
I have been visiting FiveThirtyEight every couple days since this original post. The numbers truly do update daily (there's lots more data than what I've embedded in the screencap). The % chance of a flip of the house drifted down from the 75.4 shown above to the low 70s, but this week it has been trending upward, and today it hit a new high -

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, and dramatic events could result in massive shifts, but the close we get to November, the more confident I feel about the projection.

15 August 2018

Removing trash is necessary, of course, but grooming a beach with industrial-level tools can remove the nutrients that support various lifeforms. The sterile beach becomes a haven for human sunbathers, but is a literal desert, as explained by a longread at Hakai Magazine:

Santa Monica State Beach, considered by some as the birthplace of beach
volleyball, ranks among the busiest in California. As many as 50,000
people flock to this stretch of coastline on a typical summer day, and,
at its widest, the beach could potentially accommodate more than 30
volleyball courts. Visiting a freshly raked urban beach like this, few
people realize that it can amass over 10,000 kilograms of trash during a
busy summer week. After the Memorial Day holiday in May 2015, cleaning
crews gathered 39,862 kilograms...

Just as humans may develop allergies from growing up germ-free,
beaches are suffering from being too clean. Swept flat each day, the
beach can become a biological desert, devoid of the rare plant and
animal species that make the coastlines so special. Over two tonnes of
decaying kelp get deposited on a kilometer of beach each day, a valuable
resource for wildlife that is robbed by city cleanup crews on a daily
basis.

Jenifer Dugan, a biologist with the Marine Science Institute at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that beach hoppers,
14-legged “garbage” cleaners that thrive on wrack, have been
disappearing from the coastline. “What habitat is disturbed as much as
those beaches in Santa Monica?” she asks. “No agricultural practice
disturbs the fields twice a day.”

On ungroomed beaches and other areas with little human impact, beach
hoppers’ population can reach 100,000 individuals for every meter of
beach. And on each meter of beach, they’ll devour 20 kilograms of wrack
each month. “The kelp gets vaporized!” says Dugan, who has watched it
happen. But when the beach hoppers, isopods, and other invertebrates
that subsist on the wrack disappear, shorebirds also go hungry. That’s
why barren beaches in California lose birds like killdeer and the
endangered western snowy plover. Grooming can also destroy the eggs of
the grunion, an unusual fish that lays its eggs in the sand at high
tide.

Wrack, related to wreck, archaic meaning "shipwreck", now used to refer to seaweek or pondweed.

- which I think is a better introduction to the subject matter than this rather dry text from Wikipedia:

Used generally in colloquial speech in the Nordic countries as a sociological
term to describe a condescending attitude towards individuality and
success, the term refers to a mentality that diminishes individual
effort and places all emphasis on the collective, while simultaneously
denigrating those who try to stand out as individual achievers.

There are ten rules in the law as defined by Sandemose, all
expressive of variations on a single theme and usually referred to as a
homogeneous unit: You are not to think you're anyone special or that you're better than us.The ten rules state:

"We often forget that the boundary between the United States and
Mexico was not always where it is today. It used to be seven hundred
miles farther north, following what is now the state line between Oregon
and California and running east to Wyoming before zagging southeast to
Louisiana. Originally home to the indigenous peoples of the region, much
of this land was Spanish and then Mexican territory for centuries
before becoming what we now think of as the American West.

Spanish colonists and missionaries settled here beginning in 1598. In
1821, Mexico won independence from Spain, and by the middle of the
century, it was in some ways far more advanced than its neighbor to the
northeast. It abolished slavery shortly after independence; black
Mexicans soon gained prominent positions, and indigenous people were
given the right to vote. All this came to an end in 1848, when the
United States seized half of Mexico’s land and created the border that
we know today."

Further attesting to its authenticity (and perhaps its role as a bit
of stock news used to fill space) is that an identical story had
appeared in an Australian newspaper a month prior, in the 17 July 1912,
issue of The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal, as found in the digital archives of the National Library of Australia.

An even deeper dive reveals that the text of this news item has its origins in the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics,
where it appeared as a caption in an article titled “Remarkable Weather
of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What
Scientists Predict for the Future”:

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
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